Saturday Musings

1. Browsing through a book in the New Books section of the library today, I found a folded twenty dollar bill and a check for $578. Fortunately the check was endorsed "For Deposit Only." Who uses a twenty dollar bill and a $578 check as a bookmark? Or a library book as a hiding place for valuables?
   
2. I checked out One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (yes, I'm a little behind on my reading). Check out the opening sentence: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Now that's an opening sentence.
3. I took Lovett (and Marquez) to the skateboard park this afternoon. Watching Lovett try to do an Ollie brought back frustrating reminders of him trying to learn to ride a bike. After we got home, in the back yard, he did one. I don't know who was more happy/relieved, him or me.
4. Dora had two little girlfriends over for the day. They spent most of the day in the woods behind the house. And in the creek. That's my baby girl.
5. Buck Owens died today. He was 76, and predictably his obituaries led off with his stint as co-host of Hee-Haw. But Buck had a pretty impressive career before that. His Live at Carnegie Hall album is in my CD collection. His harmonies with Don Rich are hauntingly tight. Don died in a motorcycle accident in 1974. I remember it well.
   
6. I finished Bob Spitz's biography of the Beatles this week and I realized how illiterate I am about their music (can literacy be applied to music?). I was still into Sesame Street when the Beatles broke up, so most of my familiarity with them is the yeah, yeah, yeah stuff. So I polled a couple of co-workers who are a decade older than me about their favorite Beatles albums. One chose Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, while the other chose The Beatles (The White Album) and Sgt. Pepper. So I ordered Sgt. Pepper and Revolver. Apparently, I'm behind on my music too.

The DePauls go looking for some culture

Birmingham gets a bad rap as a cultural backwater, mostly from yahoos that consider guys in tight pants and helmets running into each other as high art.

The DePauls, of course, know otherwise. Because of the medical and technological communities, this is as diverse a city as you'd ever want. We have partaken in some interesting cultural events in the past few days.

Sunday was my birthday and we went to Dreamland for lunch. Highlights from lunch: watching Lovett actually eat two ribs (see, Doug, I'm getting there!), and watching Dora's face as she phonetically sounded out the "No Farting" neon sign that hangs above the grill.

After lunch we went to see two special exhibits at the Birmingham Museum of Art: French Drawings and Ethiopian Paintings. They were extraordinary, however, we were more intrigued by a fabric panel exhibit called Through the Eye of the Needle: the Fabric Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz. Mrs. Krinitz was a Polish Jew who eluded the Nazis and later told her story through a series of 36 fabric panels that defy description. This was absolutely one of the most touching exhibits I've ever seen. You can scroll through images of these panels here, but it is like watching Gone with the Wind on a video iPod. It doesn't do them justice, but unless a trip to the 'Ham is in your future, they will have to do. Below is No. 7 The Nazis Arrive.


Tonight, we celebrated the Hindu Festival of Colors, Holi, at a local Indian restaurant called Taj India. Our reservation was at 7, and upon entering the crowded dining room our faces were splotched with colored powder. We ate from an interesting buffet. There were cauliflower pieces in some sort of batter that was tasty. Then there were disks of mashed potatoes mixed with spinach that I could have made a spectacle of myself over. There was a lemon saffron rice that was good, a couple of spicy chicken dishes, and a lamb dish that I liked.

Additionally, they offered complementary glasses of wine. The DePauls aren't imbibers by habit, but what the hay, it was free.

One word: Yuck.

It looked like white wine, but it tasted like Vick's Cough Syrup. Zelda thinks I'm nuts, and I tried several times to like it, but the more I sipped the more screwed up my face became, and with the splotches of purple powder all over it I'm sure I looked like a raisin in the making.

Before the weekend, I'd never heard of Holi, but I'm glad now I have. We'll look for it next year, and it makes me want to keep eyes and ears open for similar festivals within other cultures in town.

Wine-free, of course.

Ch.ch.changes

I am currently celebrating/mourning a huge shift in the "pour yourself into other people and have them do the same to you" portion of my life.

Though I feel a tremendous freedom and relief, it is sad at the same time. Grief, I believe they call it.

One by-product of this freedom, however, is that my creative juices are beginning to flow again. I'm excited about that. I'm interested to see where that carries me now that I have time to work with it without feeling guilty about spending time on something not apart of my "calling." I have more Maddie to come, a lot more, and I have two characters that are candidates for Ficcion, one of which is the most provocative I've ever dealt with.

Funny thing about freedom. Right after mine became quantifiable, no less than three doors popped open, three doors that have been closed for a long time. It was almost as though they were taunting me, seducing me, sirens trying to rob me of my new-found serenity. But I didn't bite. For once in my life I set a boundary and stuck to it. I refuse to settle for busyness, just for the sake of busyness. The only interruption I will accept is from my muse.

Speak to me, thy fleeting fancy. Whisper thy gifts in my ear. Blow the winds of inspiration through my hair. Sprinkle me with thy magic dust.

It is appointed unto man...

I'm not a creature of habit but I do have three weekday morning rituals: popping the top on a Diet Mountain Dew, checking e-mail, and surfing the obituary section of my hometown newspaper, looking for dearly departed old family friends.

Yesterday I saw the name of a former classmate's brother, two years younger than me. Killed in an automobile accident. Left a wife and two small children.

Sigh.

The rest of the day I was in a zone of nostalgia. I caught myself thinking of people I haven't seen or thought of in years. Mysteriously, sympathetically (morbidly?) I vicariously put myself into the family's schedule of arrangements and visitations, trying to whisper prayers for them each step of the way. It was exhausting and depressing.

I was awakened this morning around 1:30 a.m. I began to pray for them again, and when finished, I could tell I was not about to drift off to sleep any time soon. The mood was too heavy. So I got up, climbed the stairs to the attic, and searched for the box that contains my high school yearbooks.

I haven't looked for or at those things in years. I squatted down beneath the rafters, leaning against the vent pipe of the water heater, and I stared at my past until the arches in my feet began to burn and my eyes began to water in the glare of the bare bulb and the blizzard of sheetrock dust and insulation. When physically I could stand no more, I toted the four heavy volumes back to the bedroom, and for the next hour and a half continued to flip the yellowing pages. About 3:30 a.m., I forced myself to try to sleep, and I must have, for mere minutes later the alarm went off.

At the office, I settled in with my Dew and e-mail and then linked over to the obits.

Would you believe the first name on the page was of a former cheerleader, two years ahead of me, whose pictures I had seen in my freshman and sophomore annuals less than five hours previous? Forty-two years old. Two children.

Oy.

Tomorrow, I think I'll try a Dr. Pepper. Ignore the e-mail until lunchtime.

And skip the obits all together.